without knowing the specifics of plantingas claims here and without having listened to the debate, i would like to respond to your comment about it.

it sounds as if plantinga is describing chisholms problem of the criterion. namely, that we cannot simply start with standards/criteria to evaluate beliefs because such criteria would be arbitrary (or rely on an infinite regress of criteria), and thus subject to a boot-strapping problem (for an interesting example of this, see george bealers “the incoherence of empiricism”). therefore, it makes more sense to start with beliefs we already have–basic beliefs–and then construct standards/criteria.

you seem to be claiming that such basic beliefs can be mistaken (and are therefore unreliable). chisholm (and i suspect plantinga as well) would agree that such beliefs are indeed defeasible. but this isnt a problem unless you agree with the skeptic that absolute certainty is a requirement for knowledge (and hence knowledge is impossible). unless ALL our basic beliefs were faulty, there would be no reason why we couldnt generalize from them and weed out faulty or inconsistent ones in the process. if chisholm is right, then it seems there can be no other place to start formulating standards than with basic, particular beliefs.

from there, i believe plantinga is arguing that belief in god is properly basic.

http://iopha.livejournal.com/230926.html#cutid1

On the “reliability” issue, I found Dennet’s central claim to be that many cognitive processes are “syntactic” and that it is difficult to cash out a claim that such basic processes (as e.g. identifying one’s body are opposed to the external environment) are no more reliable than *chance*, which is what Plantinga explicitly claims in his hand-out.

I expand on this in my review to present a dilemma to Plantinga: if simple “syntactic” beliefs are guides to action, then the truth-value of these beliefs must be irrelevant to their adaptive success. This seems incredible: inability to generate reliable ‘syntactic’ beliefs would surely lead to an organism’s quick demise. The alternative is to deny that these beliefs have anything to do with our actions, which makes it utterly mysterious how any organism accomplishes to most basic tasks.

(Or, alternatively, to deny there are such things as Dennet’s ‘syntactic’ beliefs, which also makes it utterly mysterious how every organism on the planet is competent at avoiding solid objects.)

Also, I agree that an important oversight in Plantinga’s argument is that he doesn’t think in terms of degrees of reliability, though this doesn’t effect the argument in a precise way, because the relevant step isn’t so clear to begin with–in part for reasons you discuss in your second paragraph.

Plantinga’s first key claim seems pretty suspect to me. I’ve not read his books, so perhaps his argument is better than online presentations of it, but his examples seem contrived, in that they are selected to produce fit behaviour in one situation but ignore the way that a true belief would benefit a person in other situations. Certainly if Paul wants to be eaten but is choosy about what eats him, he’ll run away from the tiger, but presumably if the tiger catches him anyway, he will willingly surrender rather than, say, hitting it on the head with a rock. A person who does not want to be eaten does better in that situation. I suppose we could add further wrong beliefs to Paul to explain why he attacks the tiger with a rock even though he wants to be eaten, but is it still meaningful to say that he wants to be eaten if he avoids it in every circumstance?

This response to Plantinga both misunderstands his argument and begs the question. Plantinga isn’t arguing that our cognitive faculties are unreliable, but that, given naturalism and evolution, the conditional probability that they’re reliable is low (or inscrutable), and that we therefore cannot accept the conjunction of naturalism and evolution. And you couldn’t argue that we can test our cognitive faculties ‘however they are formed’ (though Plantinga’s argument concerns much more than how they’re formed), since any such test presupposes their reliability (e.g. in devising, carrying out, and analyzing the data from the tests, etc.)

In this context inscrutable means unknowable.

The problem with Plantinga’s argument is that the reliability of our cognitive faculties, however they formed, is, in a great many matters, quite testable. We can and do use our cognitive faculties to make all manner of predictions and then we can make observations to see how well our predictions worked out.

Sure, the reliability of our cognitive faculties is harder, perhaps impossible, to know on matters like metaphysics and religion where no empirically observable difference is forthcoming in support of a belief—but that’s hardly a problem for naturalists since most of us naturalists put little stock in the reliability of religious and metaphysical claims anyway.

What it comes down to is that we ought to place less confidence in matters where we are forming beliefs that aren’t empirically testable—but, again, that’s what we skeptics are prone to do anyway.